1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to service level objectives (SLOs). More particularly, the present invention provides a method, system, and computer program product for displaying calendar-based SLO results and breach values.
2. Related Art
A Service Level Agreement (SLA) is a contract between a service provider and a customer defining the criteria for the specific services that the customer expects the service provider to deliver. A service level management system tracks the services provided to the customer against the SLA.
An SLA is made up of service level objectives (SLOs), each of which defines a set of resources of a particular resource type (e.g., database server), the metric that is being measured on the resource (e.g., availability), and one or more thresholds (e.g., 98% available during peak and 100% during critical periods). Over time, on a defined business schedule as contracted with the customer, measurement data is evaluated for the set of resources for each SLO and it is determined if any of the thresholds have been breached, causing a violation. For example, an enterprise information technology (IT) provider could have a monthly Operational Level Agreement (a.k.a, Internal SLA) with an internal customer whereby if a database server is unavailable for more than 5% of a month, then it will cause a violation. Since the results of service level evaluations are not discrete values, but rather values over a time period from start to finish, conveying all this information in a single view is not possible using charting tools that do not allow charts to be overlaid onto one another. As such, the view provided by such charting tools is restricted to a single set of homogeneous data. This is complicated further by the association of a business calendar to define peak, critical, and maintenance periods associated with the customer. Furthermore, most SLA products do not implement a calendar-based evaluation function and chart only the end time of the evaluation period on simple bar charts with the threshold value shown as a fixed line. Those SLA products that do implement calendar-based evaluations, however, narrow the view to only a single evaluation result for a particular calendar period. Unfortunately, existing SLA products neglect to convey at least the following information: 1) when a maintenance period starts and ends; 2) when a non-maintenance period starts and ends; 3) the SLO threshold level for a particular calendar period; and 4) times when a service level could not be calculated do to problems with the data source (e.g., monitor failed due to power outage).